Florida’s recovery from Hurricane Milton

by philg

Our brushed-by-Milton neighborhood in Palm Beach County is almost completely cleaned up. There were some tornadoes nearby that significantly damaged houses and I can’t figure out why. “NWS: EF3 tornado with winds of 140 mph tore through Avenir community in Palm Beach Gardens” (WPTV):

“Considerable structural damage … was observed on brand new, well-built homes and included segments of concrete block walls missing and large sections of roof removed,” the NWS said in a report released Thursday afternoon.

A house in this part of Florida is supposed to be built to handle 170 mph, I think (map). A house is a “Risk Category II” building. If the headline is correct and the tornado was blowing at only 140 mph, why was a house engineered to handle 170 mph damaged? Could it be that a rotating wind is more damaging than a relatively steady wind from one direction? Were the houses not built properly? Human engineers aren’t as smart as they claim to be? Here’s a picture from the Palm Beach Post of the Nature v. Human contest:

Here’s Ron DeSantis on Friday leading a 38-minute press conference (without teleprompter) on the clean-up challenges related to Hurricane Milton:

It seems as though flgov.com is updated regularly with summaries of challenges and achievements. Example from Oct 11: “In a multi-agency response, FWC [Fish and Wildlife] officers and partner agencies rescued and evacuated approximately 426 people and 45 pets from flood waters in a Clearwater apartment complex. FWC officers used a high-water swamp buggy, UTV, and shallow-draft vessels during the rescue effort.”

Less attention is paid to those who have endured some of the worst Milton-related suffering. I’m talking, of course, about private aircraft owners. It’s very expensive to build a hurricane-proof hangar and, consequently, the typical hangar hasn’t been built hurricane-proof (the latest building code likely requires them to be able to withstand at least a Category 4 hurricane, a lower wind standard than for houses because the theory is that nobody will be inside a hangar during a hurricane). The general aviation hangars at KSRQ and KSPG are apparently badly damaged. Sarasota. which previously had a 4-year waiting list for a hangar:

The St. Pete downtown airport (walking distance to some museums), which previously had a 10-year waiting list:

Florida officialdom doesn’t seem to credit FEMA with savings lives or property. This is consistent with friends in Maskachusetts deploring the Deplorables’ lack of respect and awe for the Great Father in Washington. The righteous of MA, NY, and CA are particularly upset that Republicans have spread misinformation, e.g., that FEMA has handed out about $640 million on sheltering migrants while native-born hurricane victims aren’t getting lavish aid. Prior to Milton, one Democrat mentioned on Facebook that Congress had appropriated $20 billion for Hurricane Helene victims (Congress is currently in recess; the Democrat-run New Republic says “Lawmakers left town last week without passing additional natural disaster funding, and approving additional money may prove tricky when they return.”). Multiple Democrats responded by heaping scorn on Trump supporters for being so easily gulled into believing the Fake News about FEMA spending money on migrants.

Where could the Deplorables have gotten this misinformation? Let’s check fema.gov:

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9 thoughts on “Florida’s recovery from Hurricane Milton”

  1. Fyi, the photo you show of the damaged house with suv tossed upside down and other very severe damage to the home almost certainly resulted from winds much greater than the 140mph you cite.

  2. “..why was a house engineered to handle 170 mph damaged..”

    Do they put proposed designs in a wind tunnel, and evaluate the design?

    Is the requirement “best practices” based?

    Do the local building inspectors apply the regulations rigorously?

    Perhaps flying debris damaged the 170 mph house?

    I’m going with “rules are loosely applied”, just from personal experience with building inspectors in numerous municipalities. Maybe the guy (he/she/Ze?) that pressed the seal on the plans ought to start worrying.

    Why haven’t we seen any aerial views from the Greenspun airforce?

  3. A tornado is not only a rotating wind rather than straight line wind. It has much lower atmospheric pressure than the surrounding air, including what is under a roof or inside any other containment, such as a building or vehicle. And if a vehicle or other large object gets airborne, it might become a bit like a helicopter rotor without being attached to a shaft.
    Consider a building with all windows and doors closed is around 15 pounds per square inch pressure due to the air it contains. Chances are some of the windows will break explosively, and the roofing will explode upward. For a vehicle, if the tornado’s funnel is around 3 to 5 psi, the surface area on the bottom of a vehicle could have most of the difference (15 – 5) or 10 psi applied upward. If the area under that vehicle is, say 5 by 15 feet, that’s 75 times 144 square inches times the 10 psi, in pounds. If it weighs more than 108 thousand pounds, it will stay put, and maybe even quite a bit less weight. But not at under 10 thousand pounds. If the funnel captures it while its tires are not constraining it, it can spin around at any arbitrary attitude and move anywhere from a short distance until it hits another object that didn’t have air under it, or its weight does overcome its initial launch velocity, to hundreds of feet, maybe miles in freak circumstances.
    The first time my parents took me to the site of a tornado, there was a house that was still just about where it started, but turned 180 degrees on the foundation. And trees completely uprooted and dozens of feet away from the craters they left, and upside down. I think. I’m sure about the house, not so sure about the trees.
    After one tornado at Primrose, Nebraska (May 8, 1965), some canceled checks showed up at my brother’s farm east of Neligh, about 50 miles north-northeast of Primrose. That was an EF-4, with winds of over 200 mph.
    But after nearly 22 years in Nebraska, the only funnel clouds I’ve ever seen were in Iowa, from I-80 east of Des Moines.

    • Thanks, Dale. This makes a lot of sense! The flipped-over car in the photo certainly seems to confirm what you’ve written. Even after big hurricanes one doesn’t see a lot of overturned cars.

  4. Crazy, shoot-from-the-hip idea, but that’s why we’re here, eh? When a hurricane’s expected, maybe the hangars could have wire cable stays with turnbuckles that could go across that huge opening to prevent it from racking. And no diagonals across the back wall?

  5. I suspect the real reason is that hurricanes are mesoscale phenomena whereas tornados are microscale.

    A mesoscale “140 mph” wind often either fails to reach the surface, or is subjected to inland frictional forces and is blunted by the trees and the neighbors’ houses.

    In contrast, a tornado is a microscale phenomenon and the maximum winds occur right at the surface.

    On paper, an F3 tornado maps to a category 4 hurricane wind speeds. In practice, the F3 level winds affect everything in the tornado’s direct path, whereas the cat 4 hurricane winds only max out at the data buoys and oceanfront high rises.

    • Steve: that’s great insight. Thanks. I’m sure that you’ll agree with me that the forthcoming Kamala Harris administration has the potential to eliminate the problem of oceanfront high-rises being exposed to high winds. (In the interest of equity, the highrises will be demolished so that everyone can instead grow up in a middle class family and not a family with a breathtaking ocean view.)

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